Overcoming Secondary Stress in Medical and Nursing Practice: A Guide to Professional Resilience and Personal Well-Being

Overcoming Secondary Stress in Medical and Nursing Practice: A Guide to Professional Resilience and Personal Well-Being

Synopsis

Physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals working in today's health care settings must be prepared to offer support in dangerous times despite staffing shortages, financial pressures, and complex legal requirements. Overcoming Stress in Medical and Nursing Practice: A Guide to Professional Resilience and Personal Well-Being is a concise guide for all medical professionals who face these demands. This book: • Provides critical information about the dangers of compassion fatigue/burnout and vicarious post-traumatic stress disorder in health care settings • Introduces a newly-developed "Medical-Nursing Professional Secondary Stress Self-Awareness Questionnaire" that can be profitably self-administered at each phase of one's career and reflected upon in private, with one's mentor, or in a small group setting • Includes a unique section on strengthening one's inner life through the use of three core spiritual wisdom approaches drawn from a world religion perspective • Provides a description of four types of "voices" one needs to have in one's circle of friends to ensure that balance, perspective, growth, and challenge are fostered in one's personal and professional life • Describes how physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals can formulate a personally-designed self-care protocol for themselves Lastly, this book offers an extensive and up-to date bibliography of recent research, clinical papers, and books on medical-nursing practice and secondary stress. Overcoming Stress in Medical and Nursing Practice is an indispensable resource for medical and nursing professionals, students, and the counselors and therapists who work with them.

Excerpt

This book is written for psychologically healthy physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals. It is designed to alert them to the sources of secondary stress and provide ways to strengthen their inner lives. In the modern health care setting, knowing this information is not simply desirable; it is essential for one's personal and professional well-being.

If there is an apt proverb for the articulated and unspoken demands many people make of physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals today, it surely must be the Yiddish one: [Sleep faster…. We need the pillows!] As physician Simon Brown from the United Kingdom notes in his paper, [The Stresses of Clinical Medicine]:

Perhaps you are thinking that this is the bit that we can all do—the [nuts and bolts] clinical doctoring part of medicine. We allknow how stressful the politics of changing health service hasbeen and is likely to continue to be. We all face a dauntinguphill struggle against piles of paper, the clock, increasinglydemanding patients, complaints, managing our practices anddoing more and more for less—just to name but a few of ourdemons. But the clinical medicine is surely the enjoyable bitwhere our training takes over and tells us what to do, even ina crisis. After all we are doctors, aren't we?